A way of striking deep past enemy front lines which might just work
David Axe
29 October 2024
The Telegraph
The US Army won’t take delivery of its first new tiltrotor assault craft until 2030. But it’s already writing new doctrine for the speedy, far-flying Bell V-280 Valor. If it works in practice, this doctrine could solve one of the Army’s most serious battlefield problems: how to break through stiff enemy defences. Both Russia and Ukraine have struggled to do this in their ongoing war, and while many Western soldiers have argued that’s because they’re doing it wrong, it seems at least possible that traditional Blitzkrieg style land assaults have become less effective in the age of the drone and the “cautious tank”.
With the V-280, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but cruises like an aeroplane thanks to its pivoting rotors, the Army could simply bypass the defences – and land thousands of troops hundreds of miles away in the span of one night.
Major General Brett Sylvia is commander of the 101st Airborne Division. This was once a force of paratroopers but today it is the US Army’s specialist helicopter-borne assault formation. The general revealed the new doctrine at an industry event in Washington DC earlier this month. “We can’t actually do the large-scale, long-range air assault today,” Sylvia said, “because the platforms that we have organic to the 101st are not enough in order for us to be able to do that in one period of darkness.”
Today, the 101st Airborne Division has around 50 UH-60 Black Hawk assault helicopters and 30 CH47 Chinook heavy lift helicopters. A UH-60 can haul a squad of 11 infantry 300 miles. A CH-47 can move a platoon of 40 nearly the same distance. But both helicopters are slow, with a cruising speed no faster than 180 miles per hour.
That weighs on the 101st Airborne Division’s reach. In one recent war game, the division moved one of its three brigades – around 3,000 troops – more than 500 miles. But the simulated operation required nearly a thousand support troops to set up refuelling points, and took three nights.
Sylvia wants to do better. He wants to move a brigade the same distance, but in one night. And once V-280s start arriving, it should be possible. Sylvia said he’s “incredibly optimistic.” After all, a V-280 can carry 14 troops nearly a thousand miles at a cruising speed faster than 300 miles per hour.
As a bonus, the 101st is set to replace all its UH-60s with V-280s – and then some. Where today’s 101st has just 30 or so rotorcraft that qualify as “heavy lift,” with V-280s it’ll have four
times that number, Sylvia said. The basic idea, it seems, is for each V-280 in the division’s future inventory to make at least two round-trips in one night in order to transport a whole brigade.
There’s another key advantage for the V-280. Fully loaded normal helicopters generally can’t fly very high. They are within reach of even light shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles all the time, and in some cases they have also been brought down by drones. For this reason, helicopters of both sides generally avoid going anywhere near the front line in Ukraine. Chinooks can get high enough to be out of reach of many missiles, but only at the cost of reducing their load.
The V-280, however, when flying in aeroplane mode, will be able to get a lot higher. It still won’t be able to fly near heavy, long-ranging missile launchers in any safety, but it will be safe from lighter types.
To take advantage of the new tiltrotor, the air assault division is rewriting its logistics plans. If it went to war today, the 101st would try to capture an enemy airfield and use that as its main base for an assault deep behind enemy lines. But that base would be vulnerable to enemy counterattack. So Sylvia’s staff has been hashing out new schemes that spread support troops across a larger number of small refueling points that should be harder for the enemy to detect.
Flying farther and faster with more troops compared to a UH-60, the V-280 could take some of the pressure off the spread-out support troops. If the 101st Airborne Division can match equipment with doctrine and training, it should be able to move thousands of troops hundreds of miles between sunset and sunrise, combining mass, mobility and surprise in a way that could throw an entrenched enemy off-balance. US Army tank brigades could attack from the near side at the same time 101st Division troops attack from the far side.
That should help the Army solve the dilemma currently plaguing Ukrainian forces. Lacking a major air-assault capability, the Ukrainians have just one way of breaking through Russian defences: a frontal ground assault.
But mines, artillery and all-seeing, ever-present drones have made these assaults practically suicidal. It’s not for no reason that Ukrainian commanders measure their biggest battlefield advances in single miles. And those are rare. Most battles in Russia’s 32-month wider war on Ukraine are “attritional” and “positional.” That is, the front line barely budges. The winner is the side that loses the fewest troops and vehicles.
The US Army hasn’t fought that way in many decades – and has no appetite to. It craves mobility.
The V-280 could be just the thing to keep the Army’s main air assault formation moving.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study
medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.